The layout of your landing page is very important in order to keep your visitors there and encourage them to navigate deeper into your hotel website and eventually make a booking.

Individual landing pages should be created and designed with the aim of making the site as easy to use as possible for your potential guests. The easier the site is to use the more likely they are to proceed with the site and get to the booking stage.

Part of making your landing page easy to navigate is ensuring your sales messages are in areas of the page where they are most visible to the user. Where you decide to put key links and promotional offers is crucial to success with your website.

These heatmaps from eye tracking studies to see where users’ eyes are attracted to highlights how people always tend to focus on the main body of text and don’t really stray away from that.

This habit of internet users demonstrates how it is often difficult for banner advertising to be successful as they usually appear on the right hand side of the page or along the top – as highlighted in green in the heatmaps.

This problem also needs to be considered when creating landing pages for your hotel advertising campaigns. If you put your sales messages in the areas of the page where they will be missed by users, you will be losing out on precious bookings for your hotel.

It is essential that users cannot miss links to pages you want them to navigate to. Everything you want your visitors to see and all calls to action should be included in the main body of text - this will guide your visitors through your hotel site and lead them to making a booking with the hotel.

To find out how Motive can ensure you are optimising the conversion capability of your landing pages, talk to our Hotel Team.

It is important for hoteliers to protect their brand image online. More and more the Internet is being dominated by your guests – social networking sites, blogs and forums allow users to project their own beliefs about your hotel across the Web. This is fine if the opinion is good, however, it is inevitable that some people will have negative comments to make about the service they received with your hotel.

There is no way of stopping your guests from discussing the experience they have had of your hotel website, however, there are ways of monitoring and reacting to these discussions in order to minimise the damage caused to your online reputation.

You need to ensure that you are leading the way when it comes to your hotel’s online reputation. This can be achieved through basic SEO techniques, ensuring that you are appearing as high as possible in the search results and therefore higher than other references to your hotel.

Another crucial part of your online strategy should be interacting with your guests and responding to what is being said. If a negative comment is posted about your hotel online, the best way to limit the potential damage to your reputation is to react quickly and effectively.

If a guest has talked about a negative experience with you, it is crucial that you can respond and show that customer care is high on your priority list, if they are complaining about either the hotel itself or the hotel website you must be seen to be willing to make improvements in light of their comments.

To find out how Motive can ensure you are promoting the right image of your hotel online. Talk to our Hotel Team.

A major factor in online success is testing. Your hotel website should be tested on a regular basis in order to ensure your clients are being given the best service and your brand is being represented in the most appropriate, professional manner.

Every aspect of your hotel website should be tested and re-tested. Obviously achieving the maximum number of conversions is the main objective for your website and unless it is tested regularly there are countless different ways you could be losing potential business.

The most obvious reason for testing is, of course, to make sure your hotel site actually works. Any issues or faults with your site will be easily picked up by the user, therefore regular testing prevents your potential clients from developing a negative image of your brand. If your website is disappointing or faulty it will give the user a negative image of your company as a whole.

The term testing can also relate to other aspects of managing your website, however. Testing out different styles and approaches with your website will allow you to work out which method works best with your targeted audience.

Cookie tracking and various web statistic packages enable you to track precisely what is happening in the site and react positively as a result.

Try rotating different images and headlines on pages within the site then tracking the number of hits and click-throughs achieved with the different styles. This will help to determine what is the most effective strategy for your site.

Calls to action are key when attempting to guide users through your site; you should try out different phrases and see how it affects your conversion rates.

Success with your website is trial and error. Your website shouldn’t be a static thing that once launched is left alone. You should be constantly updating, adding to and tweaking various parts of the site to meet the needs of your users and maximise the revenue you get from it.

To find out how Motive can help you maximise the potential of your website, please get in touch with our Hotel Team.